Introduction, by Barbara Myerhoff and Jay Ruby, A Crack in the Mirror:
Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Jay Ruby, editor. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

(Note - Original pagination has been preserved for citations
purposes.)

INTRODUCTION

I. Reflexivity and Its Relatives (1)

There is a thick tangle of terms clustered around the central idea explored
in these essays: reflexivity.' Such confusion often accompanies a technical
term used in many disciplines and in everyday language as well. In this
case it is worsened by the very nature of the activity indicated by the
term: consciousness about being conscious; thinking about thinking. Reflexivity
generates heightened awareness and vertigo, the creative intensity of a
possibility that loosens us from habit and custom and turns us back to contemplate
ourselves just as we may be beginning to realize that we have no clear idea
of what we are doing. The experience may be exhilarating or frightening
or both, but it is

(1) Portions of this essay were published elsewhere (Ruby 1980).

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generally irreversible. We can never return to our former easy terms
with a world that carried on quite well without our administrations. We
may find ourselves like Humpty-Dumpty, shattered wrecks unable to recapture
a smooth, seamless innocence, or like the paralyzed centipede who never
walked again once he was asked to consider the difficulty in manipulating
all those legs. Once we take into account our role in our own productions,
we may be led into new possibilities that compensate for this loss. We may
achieve a greater originality and responsibility than before, a deeper understanding
at once of ourselves and of our subjects.

Though reflexivity takes on different shades of meaning in various disciplines
and contexts, a core is detectable. Reflexive, as we use it, describes the
capacity of any system of signification to turn back upon itself, to make
itself its own object by referring to itself: subject and object fuse. A
long tradition exists in which thought has been distinguished from unconsidered
experience: where life is not merely lived naively without being pondered
but regarded with detachment, creating an awareness that finally separates
the one who lives from his history, society, from other people. Within the
self, detachment occurs between self and experience, self and other, witness
and actor, hero and hero's story. We become at once both subject and object.
Reflexive knowledge, then, contains not only messages, but also information
as to how it came into being, the process by which it was obtained. It demonstrates
the human capacity to generate second-order symbols or metalevels-significations
about signification. The withdrawal from the world, a bending back toward
thought process itself, is necessary for what we consider a fully reflexive
mode of thought. To paraphrase Babcock (1980), in order to know itself,
to constitute itself as an object for itself, the self must be absent from
itself: it must be a sign. Once this operation of consciousness has been
made, consciousness itself is altered; a person or society thinks about
itself differently merely by seeing itself in this light.

Reflexivity can be individual or collective, private or public, and may
appear in any form of human communication: arts, natural science, the science
of humanity or any other contrived uses of, or comments on, experience.
Though it may seem modish and new, the idea of reflexivity is indeed very
old, existing in the natural as well as the social world. As an example,
consider storytelling, an ancient and apparently universal human occupation.
In all cultures and times we find embedded

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tales, stories about storytelling. Scherezade's 1001 Nights is a famous
example; Sinbad's version of Scherezade's exploits is a story about a storyteller
telling stories. And usually there is a satisfying replication between stories
and their frames; we learn about Sinbad by observing Scherezade and vice
versa. Lest one is inclined to regard reflexivity as confined to the intelligentsia,
it should be noted that Norman Rockwell a popular artist, was fond of using
this technique. One of his Saturday Evening Post covers shows him painting
the cover in which the magazine itself appears with a picture of him painting
the cover.

Reflexivity is found in the universal activity of dreaming, a story the
unconscious tells to the conscious mind. (Among the Dinka of Africa the
word dreaming is translated as a story the self tells to itself.) It is
not unusual to dream about dreaming; we awaken wondering not only what the
dream meant to say but also what it says about dreaming itself.

"Reflective" is a related but distinguishable term, referring
also to a kind of thinking about ourselves, showing ourselves to ourselves,
but without the requirement of explicit awareness of the implications of
our display. Without the acute understanding, the detachment from the process
in which one is engaged, reflexivity does not occur. Merely holding up a
single mirror is not adequate to achieve this attitude. The mirrors must
be doubled, creating the endless regress of possibilities, opening out into
infinity, dissolving the clear boundaries of a "real world." Babcock
refers to this as "identity with a difference" (ibid.: 2):

Narcissus' tragedy then is that he is not narcissistic enough, or rather
that he does not reflect long enough to effect a transformation. He is reflective,
but he ~s not reflexive-that is, he is conscious of himself as an other,
but he is not conscious of being self-conscious of himself as an other and
hence not able to detach himself from, understand, survive, or even laugh
at this initial experience of alienation.

All societies have created occasions for reflecting upon themselves:
regularly engineered crises, collective ceremonies, celebrations, rites
of passage, rituals, public performances, and the like; times when the society
tells itself who it is (or how it would like to be or should have been)
But these interpretations do not necessarily call attention to themselves
as interpretations. Often they parade as other versions of "reality,"
no matter how fabulous. They masquerade as different versions of truth into
which individuals may come and go without realizing how contrived it all
is. Rituals in particular may generate sentiments that mostly

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discourage reflexivity, requiring a mindless and frenetic, repetitive
activity that keeps the body too busy to allow the mind to criticize. This
occurs even while the event may be precariously fiddling with the frames,
mirrors, masks, reversals, screens, clowns, transvestites, and all the other
commentators that threaten the sanctity of the order of things being presented.
Precariously, a ritual may march along the edge of discovery of its own
contrivances, producing not reflexiveness but reflections. These two ideas
are capable of coexisting without penetration. The sleep of the unexamined
life is one extreme, the achingly clear realization of the nature and process
of understanding the other. No doubt most people and events range in between.
For both attitudes the devices we call metacommunication are necessary.
Markers, frames, keys, clues, and disruptions remind us not to be content
with how things seem; something more important is going on. 'The world as
it is being presented is not to be taken at face value.

The term reflexivity is in need of many fine distinctions. We have touched
on the fact that it may be public or private, collective or individual,
displayed openly or pondered introspectively. Cultures have moments of self-commentary
as do people; these moments may be performed in a fully exposed fashion
or quietly noted almost sotto voce. The commentary may be sustained or abbreviated,
mere moments or protracted examinations. When in a film, conventions of
realism are mocked, as, for example, when the main character is a film director
making a film (Francois 'I'ruffaut's Day for Night or Mike Rubio's documentary
on Viet Nam, Sad Song of Yellow Skin), we are thus reminded that we are
seeing a film, not reality or even a pretend version of reality. But this
can be merely an aside, read as a comment on the film's character and the
director's work. We can proceed to forget that illusion and reality have
been severed and return to the conventional suspension of disbelief, enjoying
the film as if we had not been told it was not what it pretended to be,
or was pretending not to be what it, in fact, turns out to be.

In more protracted reflexive works, we are not allowed to slip back into
the everyday attitude that claims we can naively trust our senses. We are
brought into a different reality because the interplay between illusion
and reality continues. The frame is repeatedly violated, and the two stories,
commenting on each other, travel alongside, simultaneously commanding our
attention and creating a different world than either represents by itself.

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In this collection of essays, these distinctions are not always maintained;
they are logical possibilities but not (or perhaps not yet) the conventional
devices used in discussions of the topic. That is, readers will not always
find the authors of these essays being reflexive while discussing reflexivity.

Since reflexivity is a term used by many people to stand for a variety
of concepts, it is essential that we attempt a formulation that includes
the various usages which are both implicit and explicit among the authors
in this book. Let us examine the idea from a communications viewpoint using
terms borrowed from Fabian (1971)-PRODUCER, PROCESS, and PRODUCT. We chose
general terms applicable to a range of phenomena because the issues raised
here are general ones not confined to anthropology. By producer, we mean
the sender of the message, the creator of the sign. Process is the means,
methods, channel, mode, code and the like, whereby the message is shaped,
encoded, and sent. The product is, of course, the text-what the receiver
or consumer gets. To be reflexive is to conceive of the production of communicative
statements as interconnecting the three components thusly:

PRODUCER PROCESS PRODUCT

and to suggest that knowledge of all three is essential for a critical
and sophisticated understanding.

Furthermore, we argue that a reflexive producer must be aware that the
conditions of consumption predispose audiences/readers to infer particular
meanings from a product (Sekula 1975; Ruby 1977). It therefore becomes incumbent
upon producers to control the conditions and contexts in which the product
appears if a specific meaning or signification to be implied.

Significant distinctions exist between reflexiveness and related attitudes
such as self-regard, self-absorption, solipsism, self-reference, self-consciousness,
and autobiography. Reflexiveness does not leave the subject lost in its
own concerns; it pulls one toward the Other and away from isolated attentiveness
toward oneself. Reflexiveness requires subject and object, breaking the
thrall of self-concern by its very drive toward self-knowledge that inevitably
takes into account a surrounding world of events, people, and places.

In an autobiography the producer-the self-is the center of the work.
Obviously the author has had to be self-conscious in the process

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of making the product, but it is possible to keep that knowledge private
and to simply follow the established conventions of the genre. In fact,
few autobiographies are truly reflexive. To be reflexive is to be self-conscious
and also aware of the aspects of self necessary to reveal to an audience
so that it can understand both the process employed and the resultant product
and know that the revelation itself is purposive, intentional, and not merely
narcissistic or accidentally revealing.

Self-reference, on the other hand, is neither autobiographical nor reflexive.
It is the allegorical or metaphorical use of self as in Woody Allen's Stardust
Memories or Janis Ian's song "Stars." The maker's life in these
works becomes symbolic of some sort of collective Everyman -all filmmakers,
all pop stars, for example. It is popularly assumed that self-reference
occurs in virtually all art forms; an artist uses personal experience as
the basis of his or her art. The devotees of a particular artist try to
ferret out biographical tidbits in order to discover the hidden meaning
in the artist's work. Again, there is the cultural fact that we believe
it is quite common for producers to be self-referential. What we wish to
stress is that self-reference is distinct from reflexivity; one does not
necessarily lead to the other.

Being self-conscious has become a full-time occupation among many Americans.
However, it is possible, and indeed common, for this kind of awareness to
remain the producer's private knowledge, or at least to be so detached from
the product that all but the most devoted are discouraged from exploring
the relationship between the maker and the work. Only if a producer makes
awareness of self a public matter and conveys that knowledge to an audience
is it possible to regard the product as reflexive. Otherwise, audiences
will not know whether they are reading into the product more or other than
what was meant (Worth and Gross 1974).

Being reflexive is structuring communicative products so that the audience
assumes the producer, process, and product are a coherent whole. To be more
formal, we would argue that being reflexive means the producer deliberately,
intentionally reveals to an audience the underlying epistemological assumptions
that caused the formulation of a set of questions in a particular way, the
seeking of answers to those questions in a particular way, and finally the
presentation of the findings in a particular way.

Until recently it was thought inappropriate, tasteless, unscientific,
overly personal, and trivial to include information about process and

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producer in a product. Moreover, it confused the audience and kept it
off balance by destroying illusion and rupturing the suspension of disbelief
assumed to be vital. Of late, we have grown to recognize our science, and
indeed, ourselves, as imaginative works and have become less threatened
by the dissolution of barriers between works of imagination and reality.
Disbelief is not so often suspended, and backstage (to use Erving Goffman's
term) proves to be considerably more alive and full of possibilities than
the domains of well-engineered, cosmetic front regions to which we were
previously confined.

II. Reflexivity as a Cultural Phenomenon

In contemporary America, the public examination of the self and its relationship
to the ways in which meaning is constructed is becoming so commonplace as
to be modish, ironically conventional. To many this is cause for concern.
The distinction between true reflexiveness and self-centeredness is not
always maintained by social critics who sometimes decry the "Me Generation"-a
degenerate society wallowing narcissistically in empty self-preoccupation
(Lasch 1978). Mark Sennett locates the demise of public responsibility in
this turning inward toward private realms of personal experience. Other
social critics remark that we have become a hedonistic, indulgent, and solipsistic
lot, escaping self-consciousness by turning to gurus, authoritarian religious
cults, and the simplifications of extreme right- or left-wing politics.
There is perhaps an area where reflexivity and self-centeredness touch,
possibly the point from which they both originated: the restoration of subjectivity
as a serious attitude, a basis for gaining knowledge and evaluating it,
a ground for making decisions and taking action.

When Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in
1962, he recognized scientific knowledge as the product of a particular
paradigm and argued that science changes through the process of discovery
of the inadequacy of previous paradigms and the subsequent construction
of a new one. Kuhn's argument detached science from reality. Like Berger
and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality (1966), it drew attention
to the sociological and cultural bases of all knowledge. Science was no
longer privileged or pure. This recognition has deeply penetrated everyday
consciousness (though not as a direct result of public interest in the writings
of the likes of Kuhn,

page 7

Berger, and Luckmann). The secularization of science has been evident
for some time. The collapse of yet another authoritative ideology seemed
to encourage the turning away from an idealized realm of facts and objectivity
toward the recognition that the individual was in it alone. Personal experience
seemed to be all that was left to throw into the breach where fixed ideological
structures had once been. As we have shown, alienation and self-knowledge
are tightly linked, if not causally connected, and reflection, introspection,
hedonism, anomie, reflexiveness are all likely to occur under these conditions.
A Kuhnian-like change in paradigm has occurred in the popular taste and
has appeared in general cultural products, going far beyond the scope of
a scientific revolution.

It is now a commonplace to recognize the relativity of experience. Students
have heard of "cultural relativity" before they take anthropology
courses! That positivism in science buckled close in time to the collapse
of confidence in the authority of government augmented the sense that the
world was not what it seemed to be. Added to this was the slow democratization
of access to the engines of truth: every citizen could afford tape recorders,
still and movie cameras, then videotape equipment. Reality could be fooled
with: speeded up, played backward, stopped, excised, and rearranged. The
truth values once imparted to these aloof and utterly neutral records, "the
really out-there," were shown to be mere imaginative products. Slowly,
then, it became apparent that we do not dwell in a world that continues
without our attention or active participation. As a socially-made arrangement,
it is a story in which citizens find themselves to be among the chief actors.
Inevitably subjectivity in such circumstances must return to favor.

Examples of reflexivity abound in all of the arts, sciences, and humanities.
Often they are associated with what Clifford Geertz calls "blurred
genres" (1980), a confusion about what were once discrete categories
for making statements. As examples of blurred genres, he cites "Harry
Houdini and Richard Nixon turning up as characters in novels, . . . documentaries
that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies
(Castenada), theoretical treatises set out as travelogues (Levi-Strauss);
. . . one waits only for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra.
We cannot tell literature from criticism, treatise from apologetic.... Something
is happening to the way we think about the way we think." This, he
points out, is a redrawing of the cultural map, wherein we see fewer fixed
types divided by sharp

page 8

boundaries. "We more and more see ourselves as surrounded by a vast
almost continuous field of variously intended and diversely constructed
works we can order only practically, relationally, and as our purposes prompt
us" (ibid.). Social science turns out to be built on models taken more
from aesthetics, gaming, theater, literature, play, and the like than the
earlier principles, laws, and facts of science (Schechner, this volume).

Geertz sees the major branches of social science as falling into three
groups: those which see social life as a game (Erving Goffman); as social
drama (Victor Turner); and as "texts" (Geertz and others). All
have in common an emphasis on interpretation, a view of the world as basically
constructed and symbolic. Reality is not discovered by scientific tools
and methods but is understood and deciphered through a Hermeneutic method.
A profoundly different world view is implied, "a refiguration of social
thought."

In the arts reflexiveness and its relatives may describe the literary
characteristic that is apparent in the Odyssey, in figures such as Cervantes
and Wordsworth, and in modern writers such as Gide, Joyce Proust, Mailer,
Updike, Barth, and gorges. Autobiography has been perhaps the strongest
mode for postwar minority expression in the United States (The Autobiography
of Malcolm X, Coming of Age in Mississippi). Increasingly writers have turned
to autobiography as an avenue for self-expression (Margaret Mead's Blackberry
Winter), as a technique for inquiry, and as material for study (the popular
books by Oscar Lewis, Erik Erikson's study of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries);
and psychiatrists report that narcissism has become a familiar presenting
symptom. We find recurring films about filmmakers, prints of printmakers
making prints, photographs of photographers and their equipment, plays about
playwrights.

Scientists, philosophers, and social scientists have also been engaged
in reflexive activities. Psychoanalysts have been concerned with the ways
in which the act of observation affects the results of the doctor-patient
relationship, philosophers with the necessity of thinking about thinking,
sociologists with the ways in which the investigator's culture alters the
methodological process itself. Historians have applied the techniques of
historical analysis to examine and revise the historical method, and scientists
continuously test their own assumptions and procedures Computers are used
to check computers, and systems analysis is applied to systems analysis.

page 9

The phenomenon of the process of creation as the subject of creation,
the mode and meaning of research as the subject of research, thought as
the subject of thinking-in short, the inalienability of the self in cognitive
and creative acts-may become, in turn, the subject of study.

To chronicle and describe these manifestations-modern and historical-would
require a book-length treatment. We have merely cited a few examples in
order to suggest that anthropological reflexivity is not unique nor is the
interest in it merely the newest fad.

MUSIC

Self-consciousness, self-reference, autobiography, and reflexiveness
appear in the Lyrics of popular songs and in performances, recorded and
live. (The remarks that follow reflect personal interest in and knowledge
about popular music and jazz. Similar examples undoubtedly exist in other
musical forms.)

Lyrics.

It is popularly assumed that composers and performers, like most Western
artists, write and sing about their own personal experiences and convictions.
Hence most popular song Lyrics are thought to be by definition autobiographical
or at least self-referential. The Lyrics are regarded as a symbolic system,
and young people spend much time trying to ferret out the true meaning of
a song's Lyrics: was "Mr. Tambourine Man" Bob Dylan's connection?
Who was Carly Simon singing about in "You're So Vain"? Some of
the personal references in Lyrics are so arcane and obtuse (such as Bob
Dylan's "Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands") they resemble South American
myths and require a Levi-Strauss to untangle them. Others are self-referential,
like Janis Ian's "Stars," and still others overtly autobiographical,
such as Dylan's "Sara."

The balladeer tradition of telling stories through song is an old Anglo-American
musical form. At least since the emergence of rock music in the sixties,
audiences have held composer/singers personally responsible for the content
of their Lyrics. Audiences expect these artists to believe in the personal,
social, and political implications of their songs. It's very much like the
song gospel singer Mahalia Jackson used to sing:

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"I'm Going to Live the Life I Sing About in My Songs." The
personal lives of artists are critically examined by their fans to see to
what degree they match the sentiments expressed in their work.

While autobiographical and self-referential statements abound, Lyrics
which are truly reflexive are rare. One clear exception is to be found in
Carole King's song "So Far Away" (Tapestry): "One more song
about moving along the highway / Can't say much of anything that's new...."
These lines clearly acknowledge that the song is an example of a song type
(actually the reference is much more complicated, but for our purposes we
can leave it there).

Performances and Records.

If any act that deliberately attempts to test an audience's assumptions
about the parameters of an art form is a reflexive act, all of John Cage's
performances are reflexive. Most recordings are from a realist tradition
that seeks to provide audiences with the illusion of firsthand experience.
However, backstage moments, when the performer reminds the audience it is
listening to a recording and not participating in a live performance, are
reflexive. For example, Dylan, in the John Wesley Harding album, begins
one song by asking the engineer/producer Bob Johnson if he is ready to record:
"Are you rolling, Bob?" This type of patter exists on the heads
and tails of all studio tapes. It wasn't planned. The only explanation for
the inclusion being intentional is the assumption that Dylan or someone
connected with the release of the record (the problem of authorship with
records is a complex one) decided to include that which is normally excluded.
In the album We're Only in It for the Money, one hears Frank Zappa musing
about the engineer and his activities in the sound booth. These musings
are not part of the normal backstage of recording. They constitute a deliberate
attempt by Zappa to remind audiences they are listening to a recording.

Zappa's reflexive concerns are also found in the liner notes of his albums.
"This is an album of greasy love songs and cretin simplicity. We made
it because we really like this kind of music (just a bunch of old men with
rock and roll clothes on sitting around a studio, mumbling about the good
old days). Ten years from now you'll be sitting around with your friends
someplace doing the same thing if there's anything left to sit on"
(Ruben and the Jets, Bizarre Records, V6 505S-X, 1971).

And, "Note: All the music heard on this album was composed,

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arranged, and scientifically mutilated by Frank Zappa (with the exception
of a little bit of surf music). None of the sounds are generated electronically
. . . they are all the product of electronically altering the sounds of
NORMAL instruments. The orchestral segments were conducted by SID SHARPE
under the supervision of the composer" (We're Only in It for the Money,
Bizarre Records, V/V6 5045X,1967).

And, "The music on this album was recorded over a period of about
five months from October 1967 to February 1968. Things that sound like a
full orchestra were carefully assembled track by track through a procedure
known as overdubbing . . ." (Uncle Meat, Reprise Records, 2024,1968).

ART

Self-portraits and self-reference in painting make their appearance by
at least the fifteenth century. Jan Van Eyck's Giovanni Arnolfini and His
Bride (1434) may be one of the earliest paintings to carry these ideas into
a reflexive stance. In the middle of the canvas Van Eyck painted a mirror
with the reflections of three people peering into the room-one of them being
Van Eyck. Lest anyone not know his face, he wrote "Van Eyck was here"
over the mirror.

One can easily characterize the entire Modernist movement as having a
reflexive concern. The Dadaists, Surrealists, Pop, Funk, Conceptual, and
Minimal artists, as well as those involved in Happenings and Performance
art, all ask their audience/viewers to become self-aware about their definitions
and expectations about art. (The Photorealists belong in this category and
indeed the entire recent return to realism in painting, but that argument
is too long and tangential to be useful here.) Among the more obvious artists
whose works abound in reflexivity are DuChamp, Magritte, and Warhol.

Leo Steinberg, in his brilliant introductory essay to a catalog on "Art
about Art" (1978), has examined the concepts of borrowing, citing,
referencing, commenting, and other means whereby one artist will explore
another's work. As Steinberg points out, the primary message of these paintings
and indeed of many paintings is a comment about art, that is, a reflexive
communication.

In attempting to explain his Neon art, Annson Kenny, a Philadelphia artist,
said, "Let me make an analogy. If I were an architect, I guess I would
insist on exposed beams, and maybe I carry this sensibility too

page 12

far. For if there were no beams I would insist they be installed. And
if that were impossible then I would insist we construct artificial beams
so that we have something to expose."

JOURNALISM

"New Journalism," according to one of its chief practitioners,
Tom Wolfe, is the writing of "accurate non-fiction with techniques
usually associated with novels and short stories" (Wolfe and Johnson
1973:15) Wolfe suggests that new journalism is the direct descendent of
the realist novel and the chief proponent of literary realism in the sixties
and seventies.

While Wolfe looks to reporting and novel writing as the major sources
of new journalism, there are two he overlooked-movies and social science,
particularly anthropology and sociology. Scene by scene construction and
realistic dialogue, as Wolfe points out, are found more frequently in films
than in novels, particularly in the last twenty-five years. Secondly, it
is possible to argue that the recognition of the need for detailed descriptions
of the cultural settings and artifacts comes as much from anthropology and
sociology as it does from the novel. The new journalism can be viewed as
a popular manifestation of the same set of ideas that spawned the work of
Erving Goffman (1959), the ethnomethodologists, and the phenomenologists,
that is, a concern with accurate, realistic descriptions of the everyday
life of ordinary people. Viewed from this perspective, new journalism is
perhaps the widest spread of the concept of culture as a means of understanding
human existence. In addition, new journalists, like ethnographers, are more
concerned with "common" folk than with super stars. This interest
clearly separates new journalists from their more traditional brethren.

While the new journalists have been influenced by social science, the
reverse is less true. Few anthropologists have experimented by attempting
to incorporate stylistic features borrowed from journalists or novelists
Oscar Lewis is a rare exception. Compare his book, Five Families (1959)
with chapter one of Albert Goldman's Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce (1974).
Both employ the composite "day-in-the-life" construction.

Without doing violence to the connotation of the term, it is possible
to see new journalists as "folk" or naive ethnographers. We call
them this (although it is hard to imagine Tom Wolfe in his ice cream suits

page 13

belonging to any folk) for several related reasons: they seem to lack
a self-awareness of the implicit epistemological basis for their activities;
they do not appear to understand the folk models of description and explanation
they employ in their writings; they have no desire or ability to go beyond
their intuition and become rigorous, that is, social scientific. Wolfe and
others like him are behaving like ethnographers and producing writings that
clearly resemble ethnography, but we are not suggesting that they are ethnographers
doing ethnography.

Their need to understand the scenes, dialogs, characters, artifacts,
and settings of human activities forces them to become participant-observers
and, like the ethnographer, to actually hang out with the people they are
writing about. "They developed the habit of staying with the people
they were writing about for days at a time, weeks in some cases" (Wolfe
and Johnson, 1973:21). The new journalists methods are quite unlike the
"literary gentlemen with a seat in the grandstand" school of journalism
and the "wham-bam-thank-you-Ma'am" approach to interviews by reporters.

So-called "investigative" reporting made popular by Woodward
and Bernstein of the Washington Post is obviously related to new journalism
in the sense that both employed participant-observation as part of their
methodology and fiction devices in their presentational styles. Wolfe would
like to disassociate new journalism from investigative reporting on the
basis that investigative reporting comes from the tradition of politically
motivated advocate reporting, and new journalism has no such overt political
tradition (ibid.:42-43).

Regardless of how these two are related historically, it IS clear the
a large number of people who call themselves journalists, non-fiction writers,
and reporters have discovered the need for participant observation and employ
styles of presentation that make their written resemble ethnographies.

Pop sociology and anthropology have come of age. Unfortunate when one
examines new journalism more closely, one discovers a naive concept of realism.
Wolfe describes new journalism as an amalgam several devices: "The
result is a form that is not merely like a novel. consumes devices that
happen to have originated with the novel al mixes them with every other
device known to prose. And all the while, beyond matters of technique, it
enjoys an advantage so obvious, built-in, one almost forgets what a power
it has: the simple fact the reader knows all this actually happened. The
disclaimers have be

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erased. The screen is gone. The writer is one step closer to the absolute
involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and
never achieved" (ibid.:34).

Wolfe seems to be saying that the literary conventions of social realism,
originated by nineteenth-century novelists such as Dickens Balzac, and Zola
and now employed by the new journalists to deal with "real life"
situations (as opposed to their original intended use, which was to create
a fiction of verisimilitude), are not merely conventions with socially agreed
upon significance and meaning but devices that provide readers with "what
actually happened."

Novelists have made a disastrous miscalculation over the past twenty
years about the nature of realism. Their view of the matter is pretty well
summed up by the editor of the Partisan Review, William Phillips "In
fact, realism is just another formal device, not a permanent method for
dealing with experience." I suspect that precisely the opposite is
true. If our friends the cognitive psychologists ever r each the point of
knowing for sure, I think they will fell us something on this order. the
introduction of realism into literature by people like Richardson Fielding
and Smollett was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology.
It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new
magnitude (ibid.).

This naive belief in realism serves to perpetuate several unfortunate
folk beliefs that must be destroyed or at least discredited in order for
any social science purporting to be reflexive to achieve general acceptance
or even comprehension. Wolfe's simple faith in realism has to be based on
the discredited idea that "the world is as it appears to be" (called
phenomenal absolutism by Segall, Campbell, and Herskovitz 1966:45). The
logical corollary of this idea is that it is possible to make bias-free
value-free descriptions of the world that are accurate and realistic.

If one shares Wolfe's view, it is logical to posit a particular role
for the new journalist. If the world is objectively describable, the journalist's
ethical and professional responsibility is to become as transparent as possible,
that is, to allow the reality of the situation to predominate. From this
point of view (one shared by many social scientists and filmmakers), opinions,
characterizations, views of the world are never the property of the author.
The author is merely the vehicle for the people he or she writes about.

In some respects new journalism is antithetical to a reflexive social
science. However, its popularity helps to create a useful tension and ambivalence
among readers-to confuse and confound audiences in

page 15

ways similar to the confusion experienced with all blurred genres. The
neat and simplistic division into fiction and nonfiction or reality and
fantasy clearly cannot be used to evaluate these works.

This creative confusion is obviously not confined to the printed word.
There is a similar tradition in documentary film. Jim McBride's David Holzman's
Diary and Mitchell Block's No Lies follow the conventions of documentary
realism. They are in fact fiction films. There is a major difference between
these films and the writings of new journalists. Once the credits appear,
members of the audience know they have seen a fiction film that merely fooled
them into thinking it was a documentary. With new journalism one can never
know which is which. The fiction film disguised as a documentary makes one
aware of the conventions of documentary realism and therefore establishes
the possibility of one being "fooled" by films that are not what
they purport to be. This filmic confusion has reached an apex with the so-called
docudramas, which follow the conventions of fiction yet apparently cause
some people to believe they are documentaries because they deal with recent
history.

New journalism can make one aware that the entire system dividing mediated
messages into nonfiction or documentary or real versus fiction or fantasy
is misleading and not particularly useful. To read something that is concerned
with real people engaged in actual behavior and discover that it reads like
a novel can cause readers to question their assumptions about narrativity,
fiction, documentary, and even the conceptual basis of their version of
reality. It can also lead them to ponder the role and responsibility of
the authors/creators of mediated messages.

Some contemporary fiction writers, as we have already suggested, are
expressing reflexiveness in their works. We think it is significant that
such different sorts of writers as John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Bernard Malamud,
Philip Roth, and John Irving have been writing fiction in which the writer
confronts himself in the act of writing or in his role as an author. If
in some ways this can be seen as a throwback to the eighteenth century self-conscious
narrator of Fielding, it is also a very modern reaction against the well-known
dehumanization of art in this century.

The novel has had an interesting history, which in many respects parallels
the development of ethnography (Edgerton and Langness 1974; Rabinow, Marcus,
and Parssinen, this volume). It is therefore not surprising to discover
that novelists and anthropologists are both con-

page 16

cerned with the implications of reflexiveness. To further complicate
the relationship between these two forms, one can find novelists such as
Vonnegut and Saul Bellow trained in anthropology.

One formal feature separating the novel from the ethnography is the fact
that realistic novels, at least, employ a narrative form, while ethnographies
are seldom, if ever, written as narratives. Narratives particularly in the
first person, are considered by most anthropologists and social science
writers to be too personal and too subjective to be vehicles for scientific
communication. It is ironic and also symptomatic of the set of problems
fundamentally related to this book that first-person narrative is perhaps
the most natural way of describing experience-including the experience of
doing fieldwork (Jay 1969). It is difficult to express your self-awareness
and reflexiveness to others without employing some first-person narrative.
Once the need to be reflexive is more widely recognized, narrative form
will become more acceptable as the rhetorical form most logical for the
communication of anthropology.

We have only touched on the range of examples of reflexive consciousness
in our culture. Its fadishness may pass, but the consequences of being reflexive
are permanent. Once you enter into the process, it is not possible to return
to the naive assumptions of the past.

III: Reflexivity as Anthropological Praxis

Reflexivity is used in anthropology in a number of different ways. It
can be a means of examining a field problem, that is, to refer to the study
of the "Natives'" reflexive acts, those events wherein, as Victor
Turner puts it, "The community . . . seeks to understand, portray,
and then act on itself, in thought, word and deed . . . public reflexivity
takes on the shape of a performance." This is what happens when a group
formally steps out of itself, so to speak, to see itself, and is aware of
so doing. Clifford Geertz's explication of a Balinese cockfight is a classic
case, in which we clearly see the Balinese playing with their most serious
conceptions. They are performing a story about their society intentionally
and, it might be said, literally, rather than metaphorically, since they
enact rather than merely refer to the interpretation involved.

Reflexivity is also a means of examining anthropology itself. Anthropology,
as a branch of science, is required to be explicit about its

page 17

methods. Science is reflexive insofar as its findings refer back to the
system in which they are explained, making clear the means by which they
were assembled. Labrot (1977) puts it this way:

Science is not static. Its development is determined to a great extent
by the body of science as it stands at any given moment. This determination
is not one of a natural progression to a greater and greater number of known
facts built on those previously discovered. It is rather one in which the
fundamental principles, the structures in a broad sense, determine the nature
of search for the facts and finally to some extent, the facts themselves.
So science, which describes the world, also determined the world which it
described.

This interpretation is becoming, as we indicated, widespread in all branches
of knowledge. The radical objective/subjective dichotomization of experience
disturbed many scientists long before reflexivity became popular. Gunnar
Myrdal warned against the trap of believing in a "disinterested social
science," which he insisted for logical reasons could never exist.
It could only confuse and leave the researcher unaware of the operations
of his or her biases.

All social sciences deal with human beings as subjects of study, but
in anthropology special problems arise because of the complex relationship
between the ethnographer and the subject of study. It is through the understanding
of self-to-other that the investigator comes to examine culture. Often the
collective, impersonal portrait of a culture is penetrated. Key informants
may jump out, however briefly, standing apart from the generalized picture
of the group-truly idiosyncratic people-ones who demand to be reckoned with
on their own terms. Because the ethnographer is enjoined to use immediate
experience to "verstehen"

(borrowing Weber's term), that is, intuitively understand and empathize,
he or she must project and identify. These are invaluable but not universally
shared abilities that can only be employed by an individual with a finely
honed sense of self. It was not mere partisan ideology that caused the early
theorists in Freudian anthropology to recommend that ethnographers' studies
would be improved if they undertook to be psychoanalyzed. These days we
are more ecumenical; we would recommend not five years on the analyst's
couch but any personal study that develops the anthropologist's self-awareness
of his or her own culture. With increased self-awareness, studies can be
not only more penetrating but also more reliable.

The anthropologist, as a data-generating instrument who must also

page 18

make explicit the process by which he or she gathers data, is an integral
part of the final product: the ethnography. I he anthropologist must take
his or her behavior into account as data. To quote Levi-Strauss (1976),
participant-observation, the basis of fieldwork methodology, makes this
essential.

To Rousseau we owe the discovery of this principle, the only one on which
to base the sciences of man.... In ethnographic experience, the observer
apprehends himself as his own instrument of observation. Clearly he must
learn to know himself, to obtain from a self who reveals himself as another
to the I who uses him, an evaluation which will become an integral part
of the observation of other selves.

Thus the public examination of the anthropologist's response to the field
situation, the inclusion of methodology, and participation in constructing
the final report is reflexive in anthropology. The examination of the form
in which ethnographic data are reported also becomes a reflexive act, that
is, creating an ethnography of anthropology, as some of the authors in this
book have done.

To refer to our earlier paradigm, producer, process, and product may
be fully included. The process or methodology is made overt, the investigator
portrayed. But in anthropology another layer may be entered into this equation:
the effect of the anthropologist looking at the native looking at the anthropologist
(cf. Michaels, this volume). We enter the hall of mirrors, the infinite
regress, yet it is undeniably necessary. The subject changes by being observed,
and we must observe our impact on him or her and the resultant impact on
ourselves and.... To refer again to the Balinese cockfight, we first see
the anthropologists looking at the Balinese, and the Balinese looking back
at them; then a change occurs as the Balinese alter their attitudes toward
the anthropologists, who in turn begin to see the Balinese differently.

Ethnographer-filmmaker Jean Rouch has some thought-provoking comments
on this matter. Borrowing Vertov's term "cinema-eye" (used to
describe a way of seeing with the camera eye that is different from seeing
with the human eye), it can be said that the ethnographer also alters his
ordinary modes of perception in the field.

In the field the observer modifies himself; in doing his work he is no
longer simply someone who greets the elders at the edge of the village but-to
go back to Vertovian terminology-he "ethno-looks" "ethno-observes"
"ethno-thinks,' And those he deals with are similarly modified in giving
their confi-

page 19

dence to this habitual foreign visitor they "ethno-show," "ethno-speak,"
"ethno-think."

It is this permanent ethno-dialogue which appears to me to be one of
the most interesting angles in the current progress of ethnography. Knowledge
is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge;
it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those they
study meet on a path which some of us now call "shared anthropology"
(1978:8).

Rouch does not go to the extreme of calling his native subject an ethno-person,
but it would not be unreasonable to do so. The anthropologist and the subject
of study together construct an interpretation of a cultural feature, an
understanding of the interpreter, that would not have come into existence
naturally. The study is an artifice and resembles nothing but itself, a
collusion of two viewpoints meeting m a middle terrain, created by the artificial
circumstances of the foreigner's visit and project, disappearing when the
foreigner departs. Both the portrait of self at work in the field (if it
includes the impact of the natives' vision of self) and, equally, the impact
of the native on the ethnographer are constructions arising out of the ethnographic
enterprise, studies of ethno-persons.

The human scientist has had to learn how to relate self-knowledge of
him- or herself as a multisensory being with a unique personal history as
a member of a specific culture at a specific period to ongoing experience
and how to include as far as possible this disciplined self-awareness in
observation on other lives and in other cultures (Mead 1976:907).

We now wish to explore an apparent paradox within anthropology, which
both reveals the need for a reflexive anthropology and explains its absence.
It can be expressed as follows: Why do most anthropologists identify themselves
as scientists and their work as scientific yet often fail to describe adequately
the methods employed in their research and to account for the possible effects
of the researcher on the research? Why is Malinowski's fifty-year-old-admonition
so seldom followed (1922: 2-3)?

The results of scientific research in any branch of learning ought to
be presented in a manner absolutely candid and above board. No one would
dream of making an experimental contribution to physical or chemical science,
without giving a detailed account of all the arrangements of the experiments;
an exact description of the apparatus used, of their number; of the length
of time devoted to them; and of the degree of approximation with which each
measurement was made. . . in Ethnography, where a candid account of such
data is perhaps even more

page 20

necessary, it has unfortunately in the past not always been supplied
with sufficient generosity, and many writers do not ply the full searchlight
of methodic sincerity, as they move among their facts, but produce them
before us out of complete obscurity.

A general examination of ethnographic literature reveals a fairly consistent
lack of systematic, rigorous statements on method and discussions of the
relationship between research and the researcher. Recently this trend has
shifted with the publication of works like Berreman's Behind Many Masks
(1962). While this and other books may signal a change, Bellah is unfortunately
still accurate when he states that "Rarely have anthropologists regarded
fieldwork as a serious object of study, it is tacitly accepted as their
major activity" (Rabinow 1977:ix).

In an unpublished study of reflexive elements in written ethnography,
Miller (1977) has suggested two places where they are most likely to be
found outside of the work, one of them being in introductory remarks or
prefaces or postscripts. The tradition appears to have begun with Malinowski
(1922). Yet in spite of his admonition to others, Malinowski's own methodological
statements were rather perfunctory. As Young (1979: 11) points out,

Despite his incorrigible self-dramatization and his claim that "the
facts of anthropology attract me mainly as the best means of knowing myself,"
(Malinowski 1932:xxv), Malinowski did not propose any theory which included
the observer in its frame of reference.... He mentions the "personal
equation" of the investigator only to caution against selectivity in
observation and recording, and he counsels the keeping of an "ethnographic
diary" of events as a corrective measure (1922:20-21). Paradoxically,
however, the field diaries which Malinowski himself kept (1969) constitute
an entirely different form of document-one which, in laying bare his prejudices,
gives the lie to his public image and puts his sincerity severely to the
test.

Other examples of "reflexive" instructions in ethnographies
include Bateson's Naven (1936), in which the work is bracketed with reflexive
statements in the preface and postscript (cf. Marcus, this volume).

The other location of reflexive elements Miller found was in travelogue-like
popularized or anthropological accounts of fieldwork. For example, Maybury-Lewis
in his introduction to The Savage and the Innocent states that,

This hook is an account of our experiences, it is not an essay in anthropology
(emphasis ours). Indeed I have tried to put down many of those things which

page 21

never get told in technical anthropological writings-our impressions
of Central Brazil, our personal reactions to the various situations in which
we found ourselves, and above all, our feelings about the day-to-day business
which is mysteriously known as "doing fieldwork" (1965:9).

Other examples of this form of reflexivity would include Levi-Strauss's
memoir, Tristes Tropiques, Alex Alland's account of his fieldwork in Africa
(1975), and Hortense Powdermaker's professional autobiography, Stranger
and Friend (1966).

Perhaps the most extreme form of separation of reflexive elements from
the ethnography is to be found in the writing of a novel about fieldwork
under a pseudonym (Bowen 1954). While we have not systematically examined
the question, it is our impression that more anthropologists than any other
social scientists write novels, plays, poems, and science fiction. We believe
they do so because of the strictures imposed by traditional science on the
reporting of experience. They cannot do it in their ethnographies so they
seek other outlets.

Further, anthropologists who want to be reflexive and still report on
their fieldwork in a "scientific" manner have found it difficult
to locate an acceptable form. "The Jungle People has a plot because
the life of the Kaingang has one. Yet, since behavioral science views life
as plotless, The Jungle People violates an underlying premise. Moreover,
in behavioral science, to state that life not only has a plot but must be
described as if it did is like spitting in Church" (Henry 1964:xvii).
Hymes states the conflict between the reporting of experience in ethnography
and the scientifically acceptable communicative forms quite well (cf. Parssinen,
this volume): "There is an inescapable tension in ethnography between
the forms, the rhetorical and literary forms, considered necessary for presentation
(and persuasion of colleagues), and the narrative form natural to the experience
of the work, and natural to the meaningful report of it in other than monographic
contexts. I would even suggest that the scientific styles often imposed
on ethnographic writing may produce, not objectivity, but distortion"
(1973:199-200)

In addition to an anti-narrative tradition within the canons of scientific
communication, there are two additional strictures that further conflict
with reflexivity. Scientists are supposed to use the passive voice and the
third person-for example, to say, "The Bushman makes bow and arrows,"
not, "I saw some Bushmen make a few bows and arrows. Both literary
devices cause statements to appear to be authorless, authoritarian, objective,
and hence in keeping with the prevailing positivist empiricist philosophies
of science.

page 22

As Marcus (this volume) argues, ethnography is virtually an unanalyzed
literary genre. The art and craft of producing an acceptable ethnography
is learned indirectly and accidentally. The question of the relationship
between ethnography and other literary forms is seldom discussed. Langness
(in Honigman 1976:254) points out that ". . . the whole question of
the relationship of ethnography to poetry and playwrighting, as well as
to the short story and the novel, has never been carefully examined. What,
for example, are the similarities and differences between ethnography and
literary 'realism?' What is the relation of the novelist's quest for verisimilitude
and the task of the ethnographer? Could an ethnography be both anthropologically
acceptable and at the same time a work of art?"

The following statements constitute the paradox we have been discussing:

1) Most anthropologists consider themselves social scientists and their
work as being scientific;

2) To be scientific means the scientist is obligated to systematically
reveal research methods and any other factors which might affect the outcome
of the investigation;

4) Those methodological statements that do exist are most frequently
attached to the ethnography.

Some social scientists do not see the situation as being paradoxical.
They feel that being reflexive is actually counterproductive to their goals.
Honigman, while advocating the acceptance of a "personal" approach
in anthropological research, states that

Critics demanding a high degree of self-awareness of investigators using
the personal approach are unrealistic. It is chimerical to expect that a
person will be able to report the details of how he learned manifold types
of information through various sensory channels and processed it through
a brain that can typically bind many more associations far more rapidly
than the most advanced well-stocked computer.... Some of the individual
factors operating in description can be brought into awareness and controlled,
but a high degree of self-conscious attention to the process of description
can only be maintained by scaling down the number and range of events that
are to be studied, thereby possibly impoverishing the results while gaining
a comparatively explicit account of how information was collected (1976:243
46).

page 23

We would agree that excessive concern with either the producer or the
process will obviously cause the focus of the product to turn inward; total
attention to the producers creates autobiography, not ethnography. However,
anthropologists have largely denied the need for reflexivity and ignored
the scientific necessity for revealing their methods. As a consequence,
perhaps we need a brief period of overcompensation. We need several extensive
attempts to explore the implications of doing reflexive anthropology before
we can establish conventions for "how much is enough." Questions
of narcissism, of turning oneself into an object of contemplation, of becoming
a character in your own ethnography are very fundamental and complex. Until
we have a tradition, albeit a minor one, of the ethnography of anthropology
(Scholte 1972), we think that a concern over excesses is a bit premature.

What anthropology has to offer is primarily a systematic way of understanding
humanity-ours as well as everyone else's. Therefore, the processes we evolve
to accomplish that task may be our most significant contribution, that is,
teaching others to see human beings from an anthropological perspective.
Geertz has said it well (1973a:16):

Anthropologists have not always been as aware as they might be of this
fact: that although culture exists in the trading post, the hill fort, or
the sheep run, anthropology exists in the book, the article, the lecture,
the museum display, or sometimes nowadays, the film. To become aware of
it is to realize that the line between mode of representation and substantive
content is undrawable in cultural analysis as it is in painting; and that
fact in turn seems to threaten the objective status of anthropological knowledge
by suggesting that its source is not social reality but scholarly artifice.

It does threaten us, but the threat is hollow. The claim to attention
of an ethnographic account does not rest on its authors' ability to capture
primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a carving,
but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in such places,
to reduce the puzzlement-what manner of men are these?-to which unfamiliar
acts emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturally give rise. This raises
some serious problems of verification, all right-or if "verification"
is too strong a word for so soft a science (I, myself, would prefer "appraisal"),
of how you can tell a better account from a worse one. But that is precisely
the virtue of it. If ethnography is thick description and ethnographers
those who are doing the describing, then the determining question for any
given example of it, whether a field journal squib or a Malinowski-sized
monograph, is whether it sorts winks from twitches and real winks from mimicked
ones. It is not against a body of uninterpreted data, radically thinned
descriptions, that we must measure the cogency of our explications, but
against the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with
the lives of strangers. It is not worth it, as Thoreau said, to go round
the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

page 24

Anthropology has too long suffered from the popular assumption that it
is "the study of oddments by eccentrics." As such we are, at best
sources of trivial information and cocktail-party conversations like, "Do
the Eskimos really live in igloos?" The concept of culture as a means
of understanding our humanness is a powerful idea. Too bad we haven't conveyed
it to more people in a form that they can apply to their own lives. To hide
our personas and our procedures from the public clearly lessens our impact.

Regardless of whether or not one is convinced by arguments pro or con
for a full reflexive statement in every ethnography, there can be little
argument that anthropologists tend to be remiss in fulfilling their scientific
obligation to specify their methods. We believe the reasons for this apparent
self-contradictory behavior are to be found in the implicit, taken-for-granted
philosophical position of many American anthropologists, which we would
characterize as naive empiricism and/or positivism/pragmatism. By naive
empiricism we simply mean someone who "tends to believe that the world
'out there' is isomorphic in every respect with the image the detached observer
will form of it" (Nash and Wintrob 1972:529). By positivism, we mean
the idea "that, since experience is the sole source of knowledge, the
methods of empirical science are the only means by which the world can be
understood" (Stent 1975:1052).

Joined together into a philosophy of science, one that dominated the
development of social science, they produce the major cause of the paradox.
This point of view causes the social scientist to strive to be detached,
neutral, unbiased, and objective toward the object of study; to withhold
value judgments; to disavow political, economic, and even moral positions.
In other words, the social scientist must attempt to negate or lose all
traces of his or her culture so that someone else's culture can be studied.
As Nash and Wintrob put it, "to turn the field worker into a self-effacing
creature without any reactions other than those of a recording machine"
(1972:527).

The procedures developed to insure the neutrality of the observer and
the control necessary for this type of research were evolved in a science
of subject/object relations and not an anthropological science of subject/subject
relations. Setting aside any political or ethical considerations, one cannot
make another human being into an object of study in the same way that one
can control animals or inanimate objects.

This conceptualization of science may be possible if one assumes that
researchers exclusively use quantitative methods in controlled ex-

page 25

perimental settings. While anthropologists do employ quantitative methods
(although seldom in labs), our chief claim to methodological fame and the
primary method for doing ethnography is the most involved, nonstandardized,
personal version of qualitative methods: participant-observation. We recognized
quite early that, "The first means to the proper knowledge of the savages
is to become after a fashion like one of them . . ." (Degerando 1800:70).
While anthropologists seldom talk about it publicly, all fieldworkers know
that, "In the field the researcher becomes trapped in the role of power
broker, economic agent, status symbol, healer, voyeur, advocate of special
interest, manipulator, critic, secret agent, friend or foe" (Konrad
1977:920).

Anthropologists who subscribe to a naive empiricist/positivist view of
science and practice participant-observation in their fieldwork find themselves
in a bind. "Since participant observation causes the researcher to
become the primary instrument of data generation, his own behavior, his
basic assumptions, the interactional settings where research is conducted,
etc., all now become data to be analyzed and reported upon" (Honigman
1976:259). One is almost forced to conclude that ". . . an ethnography
is the reflective product of an individual's extended experience in (usually)
an exotic society mediated by other experiences, beliefs, theories, techniques
(including objective procedures when they are used), personal ideology,
and the historical moment in which the work was done" (ibid.).

The more the ethnographer attempts to fulfill a scientific obligation
to report on methods, the more he or she must acknowledge that his or her
own behavior and persona in the field are data. Statements on method then
begin to appear to be more personal, subjective, biased, involved, and culture
bound; in other words, the more scientific anthropologists try to be by
revealing their methods, the less scientific they appear to be.

Given that dilemma, it is not too difficult to see why most anthropologists
have been less than candid about their methods. They are justifiably concerned
that their audience will realize that, as Sue-Ellen Jacobs has said, "Perhaps
the best thing we learn from anthropological writings is how people who
call themselves anthropologists see the world of others (whoever the others
may be)" (in Chilungu 1976:469). It is asking anthropologists to reverse
their traditional assumption about the ultimate goals of anthropology, and
to suggest instead that what anthropology has to offer is a chance to see
the native through the eyes of the anthropologist. Hence, most anthropologists
would rather

page 26

live with the dilemma than explore the implications of being reflexive.
Some anthropologists retreat behind slogans like, "Anthropology is
a soft science," or "Anthropology is actually a humanities with
scientific pretensions." Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has summed up the position
nicely in a recollection of his own graduate student days at the University
of Chicago (1974:176):

I began with physical anthropology. I was taught how to measure the size
of a brain of a human being who had been dead a long time, who was all dried
out. l bored a hole in his skull, and I filled it with grains of polished
rice. J hen I emptied the rice into a graduated cylinder. I found this tedious.
I switched to archaeology, and I learned something I already knew; that
man had been a maker and smasher of crockery since the dawn of time. And
I went to my faculty advisor, and I confessed that science did not charm
me, that I longed for poetry instead. I was depressed. I knew my wife and
father would want to kill me, if I went into poetry. My adviser smiled.
"How would you like to study poetry which pretends to be scientific?"
he asked me. "Is such a thing possible;" I said. He shook my hand.
"Welcome to the field of social or cultural anthropology,' he said.
He told me that Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were already in it-and some
sensitive gentlemen as well.

Some anthropologists, particularly in the last fifteen years, have begun
to seek a solution to the problem (e.g., Honigman 1976, and Nash and Wintrob
1972, represent two recent attempts to survey the literature). The reasons
for this renewed interest (renewed in the sense that Mead and others actually
started in the 1930s, but the interest died out) are complex and probably
have their origins outside of anthropology in the culture at large. Nash
and Wintrob list four factors for the emergence of what they call "self-consciousness"
in anthropology: 1) An increasing personal involvement of ethnographers
with their subjects; 2) the democratization of anthropology (a polite way
of saying that in the sixties some lower-middle-class students who didn't
share some of the "gentlemanly" assumptions of the older anthropologists
got Ph.D.s; 3) multiple field studies of the same culture; and 4) assertions
of independence by native peoples (1972:529). To that we would like to add:
1) The influence of other disciplines, particularly the effect of phenomenological
and symbolic interactional sociology, ethnomethodology, and structural linguistics;
2) the development of Marxist criticism of anthropology in the United States-a
criticism aimed at an examination of anthropology as an ideology; and 3)
the rise of an urban anthropology concerned with doing ethnography in the
United States, the complexity of the subject matter having caused some researchers
to question such fundamental ideas as culture.

page 27

We have articulated a view of reflexivity as it pertains to anthropological
praxis. To summarize what should be obvious now, we have argued that anthropologists
behave like scientists to the degree that they publicly acknowledge the
role of the producer and the process in the construction of the product,
or, simply, that being reflexive is virtually synonymous with being scientific.
Moreover, we have suggested that the lack of reflexive statements on methods
is a consequence of a particular view of science espoused by many anthropologists.

In some ways we have said nothing novel. Social scientists have been
discussing these problems and ideas for a long time. Because of the domination
of participant-observation field methods, anthropologists have been particularly
occupied with creating a science that allows for both quantitative and qualitative
methods that can justify qualitative procedures as being scientific.

For a variety of reasons discussed earlier, the elements are now present
for the emergence of a new paradigm for anthropology and perhaps for science
in general. Margaret Mead in her 1976 presidential address to the American
Association for the Advancement of Science noted this development (1976:905):

Both the methods of science and the conflict of views about their more
general applicability were developed within Euro-American culture, and it
is never easy to break out of such deeply felt but culturally bound conceptions.
Because of the clarity which has been achieved I believe we can move from
conflict toward a new kind of integration. As a first step in this direction
I suggest that it is necessary to recognize that our knowledge of ourselves
and of the universe within which we live comes not from a single source
but, instead from two sources-from our capacity to explore human resources
to events in which we and others participate through introspection and empathy,
as well as from our capacity to make objective observations on physical
and animate nature.

The problem stated in its simplest form is to find a way to be scientific,
reflexive, and do anthropology-to resolve the conflict between what anthropologists
say and what they do. Most of the authors in this book address themselves
to the resolution of this conflict.

IV: The Editors' Confessions

To be consistent with the position espoused in this introduction, we
should reveal ourselves as producers and discuss the process employed

page 28

in the construction of this work, that is, be reflexive about our ideas
of reflexivity. What follows is a brief confessional aside.

Jay Ruby.

My interest in these ideas stems from what began as an elitist fascination
with "backstage" (Goffman 1959). I was convinced that if I could
understand how someone made something and I knew who they were that that
knowledge would make me an "insider." In time the interest broadened
and became more sophisticated. It caused me to admire the novels of Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr., and Tom Robbins, the music of Frank Zappa, the photography
of Lee Friedlander and Duane Michaels, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and
Woody Allen, the paintings of Rene Magritte, and the comedy of the Firesign
Theatre and Monty Python. Whatever else these people were doing, they were
trying to raise the critical consciousness of their audiences by being publicly,
explicitly and openly self-aware or reflexive. "I have become an enthusiast
for the printed word again. I have to be that, I now understand, because
I want to be a character in all my works. I can do that in print. In a movie,
somehow, the author always vanishes. Everything of mine which has been filmed
so far has been one character short, and the character is me" (Vonnegut
1972:xv).

Two other factors figured in the development of my interest. For the
past fourteen years I have been engaged in exploring the theoretical possibility
of an anthropological cinema (Ruby, this volume). In this process I discovered
an apparent conflict between the scientific necessity for the anthropologist
to reveal his or her methodology and the conventions of documentary film,
which until recently have virtually prohibited such a revelation. In seeking
a solution to this dilemma, I was drawn to the literature on reflexivity.
In 1974 during the Conference on Visual Anthropology at Temple University
in Philadelphia, I organized a series of film screenings and discussions
on autobiographical, personal, and self-referential films. In doing so,
I began in a more formal and systematic way to explore the relationship
between what I am now calling reflexive film and reflexive anthropology.

Finally, like many anthropologists, I have felt a progressively widening
ethical, political, and conceptual gap between the anthropology I learned
in graduate school and the world as I have come to know it.

page 29

Among the wedges, I would note the publication of Malinowski's diary
(1967) and the public disclosure of the clandestine use of social scientists
in Latin America and Southeast Asia. These revelations produced a crisis
of conscience and loss of innocence for many of us and gave our personal
dilemmas about the role of the researcher a moral and political perspective
(Hymes 1969). It should be difficult if not impossible for us now to continue
to defend our naive assumptions about our responsibilities toward the people
we study and toward the intended audiences for our work. We should stop
being "shamans of objectivity." After the involvement of anthropologists
in Viet Nam, it is an obscene and dishonest position.

It should be obvious by now that I am partisan. I strongly believe that
anthropologists have ethical, aesthetic, and scientific obligations to be
reflexive and self-critical about their work. I would, in fact, expand that
mandate to include anyone who uses a symbolic system for any reason.

Lest the reader be led to believe that what follows are some hackneyed
political and moralizing sermons on the sins of objectivity and value-free
science, I wish to assure you that having exposed myself sufficiently to
make you aware of my motivations, a more reasoned exploration of these ideas
follows.

In 1977 I became aware that reflexivity was being used to explore the
social construction of self and those social rituals designed for people
to be reflective and reflexive. Through the works of Barbara Myerhoff, Victor
Turner, Richard Schechner, Barbara Babcock, and others, I saw how social
dramas, ceremonies, rituals, and fieldwork could be reflexive moments in
an individual's life.

One of the functions of these performances is to give definition to self
by seeing the self alongside or in opposition to "the other."
Then the act of doing anthropology provides our collective self-culture-
with a chance to examine itself through the other that exotic cultures represent.
We are able to see ourselves anew when we experience other vicariously through
the experience of being an ethnographer. The ethnographer becomes audience
for a performance so that he or she can be a performer for us, the audience.
Furthermore, fieldwork can be a reflexive experience, because ethnographers
are trying to acquire social identities not their own. In one sense the
success of ethnographers is measured by how well they can become not themselves
while at the same time retaining their original identity.

page 30

Barbara Myerhoff.

My interests in reflexivity go far back into my childhood, though, of
course, I had no such term to apply to them. The fascinating play with alternate
realities came naturally out of an unhappy childhood in which books were
a great consolation, providing an alternative world, more real and better
in every way than the one in which most mortals spent their time. But even
before reading, I recall some of my earliest moments of private play occurred
as I lay in bed during a long illness and stared at the ceiling, which I
found I could make into the floor. I then entered a realm of space and privacy
all my own, where strange appurtances that others called lamps jutted abruptly
into the air, asking to be used in surprising ways, as tables, chairs. I
looked pityingly at the upside down mortals (all adults) living mindlessly
in an unreal world below me, a Platonic shadow of the true world that I
inhabited.

The play with the notion of the "real" versus the "pretend"
shadow world, one actual, the other an upside-down reflection, was a theme
that continued to haunt me. Many years later, I understood that this fascination
was more than an idiosyncrasy, that it had religious counterparts. Working
among the Huichol Indians, I participated in their experience of visiting
their sacred land, a kind of Paradise, in which everything was reversed.
Sacredness was the obverse of the normal or mundane, and as many actions
as possible were done backwards. I he suggestion of an alternative opposite
realm that somehow exchanges attributes with its counterpart, blurring the
clear lines between actual and imagined, was a source of continuing fascination,
which I fully understood during a camping trip in 1977 when I witnessed
a perfect reflection of the scene I inhabited in a still mountain lake that
lay before me. So clear was the reflection that the two images were indistinguishable
save that one was upside down. It was not necessary to choose between them.
The image and reflection were fused, completing a reality between them,
a totality that achieved a unification and state of perfection. Dream and
the waking life, unconscious and conscious, the above and the below, the
hidden sacred domain and the palpable ordinary one were the same. l he mending
of those splits was a numinous experience that told me clearly, for the
first time, why I had always been so attracted to and disturbed by the problem
of reflected realities.

When I grew into the world of words, my life was dominated by a storytelling
grandmother, an illiterate woman of European origin,

page 31

whose passion for storytelling transformed my life. Each day she told
me a different story about one of the houses on the hill behind our house.
We imaginatively entered each in turn, making their stories into a commentary
on our own lives. One day I wept because the kitchen window was covered
with frost. I thought there would be no story since we could not see out.
My grandmother laughed, warmed a penny in her palm, pressed it against the
glass to make a peephole in the frost, then informed me that I had all I
needed there. An opening big enough to glimpse the street outside, transformed
by this frame, this tiny aperture, providing the sharpest possible focus;
the ordinary scene without became a spectacle, separated from the ebb and
flow of mundane life around it. It was the first time I clearly understood
that something magic happened when a piece of nature was isolated and framed.
It was the beginning of some comprehension of the seriousness of paying
attention to a selected aspect of one's life or surroundings.

Alienation came naturally to an unhappy, not too healthy child who happened,
as well, to be raised in a neighborhood and time when children of immigrants
were not fully human beings. Alienation is on/ precondition for a reflexive
attitude, but is not reflexivity itself. This private sense of separateness
was transformed into a useful sensibility when I began to study the social
sciences. I recall being immensely amused and reassured by encountering
a Feiffer cartoon. A small boy was not allowed to play baseball with his
friends. He stood on the sidelines, excluded, and, for lack of anything
better to do, began to observe the rules of the game. He discovered "baseball"
as a code, and in the last square was shown somewhat smugly commenting,
"It's good thing the other kids wouldn't let me play. Otherwise I never
would have noticed (the rules of the game)."

An extended period of travel also paved the way for my interest reflexivity.
I recall being confused and fascinated by the sense of somehow being a totally
different person as I traveled from country country. Something about how
people saw me clearly altered the way I saw myself.

These vague interests and proclivities came into sharp focus during my
first fieldwork, when I had an extreme sense of being a strange. It was
clear that I was more a nonperson to the Indians than they were to me. This
was brought home to me painfully and dramatically when my key informant
visited my home. With pride I showed him the things he and others from his
group had given me, displayed in my home. Then I showed him pictures of
my family, assuming he would be as

page 32

interested in my mother's brother's son as I was in his. Nothing of the
kind. The relationship between us, though strong and deep, was not symmetrical.
It was not friendship, therefore, what was it? Neither of our cultures provided
a suitable category. Enforced thought about how we saw each other ensued,
though a term to call what we meant to each other never did appear.

Another significant experience that encouraged reflexive thinking occurred
when I began to turn my dissertation into a book. I had the good fortune
of working with an excellent editor who required that I specify at every
point how I knew what I was reporting. She deleted all the impersonal forms,
the third person, the passive voice, the editorial "we," and insisted
on responsibility. "How did you know this?" "Who saw that?"
"What was seen?', "Who is 'one?'" Her insistence on an active
and personal voice was extremely difficult but eventually invaluable. By
requiring me to insert myself and my verified observations into the manuscript,
the editor was requiring the methodological rigor that we are simultaneously
trained to value and avoid. After this bout with the editor, I found I had
written a book I trusted more, that was clearer and more reliable (and,
I think, more readable as well), and I had received a lesson in anthropological
methods better than many I had been offered in the course of my formal training.

The last, clearest experience of reflexivity occurred in my more recent
fieldwork among my own people. Required by political and personal circumstances
to work at home, and among my own people (Eastern European Jews who were
also very old), I found myself doing a complex enterprise that involved
ceaseless evaluation of the effects of membership on my conclusions. I have
written about this at some length elsewhere (1979) and will only adumbrate
the high points here. It was soon evident that I knew more than I needed
to, or sometimes wanted to, about the people I was studying, that at every
juncture, I was looking at my own grandmother, which was to say a variation
of myself-as-her, and as I would be in the future. We even looked alike.
I responded with embarrassing fullness to my subjects' uses of personal
mechanisms of control and interpersonal manipulation, such as guilt and
tacit obligatedness, spontaneously (even involuntarily) acknowledging over
and over that indeed we were one. In time I began to realize that identification
and projection were enormously rich sources of information but often painful
and often misleading, requiring my constant monitoring.

Another push toward reflexivity occurred when I made a film about this
group. I began to understand the impact on them of being seen and

page 33

saw eventually how my view of them, and my production of this view in
the form of a film, affected them, and in turn affected the world in which
they lived, that is, how they were seen by others (who, by the way, had
previously largely ignored them). The group, it must be added, was a naturally
performative one, always enacting an interpretation of themselves on which
the outside world did not agree. They persisted and ultimately succeeded
in convincing themselves-and anyone they managed to corral as an audience-that
this was a true picture. It became that by virtue of being performed. As
Geertz put it in another context, their self-interpretation came into being
as it was formulated. It did not exist clearly or in a coherent fashion
until it had been publicly demonstrated. "Subjectivity does not properly
exist until it is thus organized, art forms generate and regenerate the
very subjectivity they pretend only to display. Performances are not merely
reflections of a pre-existing sensibility analogically represented; they
are positive agents in the creation and maintenance of such a sensibility"
(Geertz 1980). A consummate, self-commenting and self-conscious people (as
pariah people often are' the group I studied completed my conversion to
reflexivity as one of the most interesting and generative attitudes possible.

In 1977 we began to discover our mutual interest in reflexivity and to
exchange drafts of papers and ideas. We decided it would be a good idea
to organize a symposium bringing together some of the people who were working
out their views of reflexive anthropology. So, in 1978 we organized a day-long
symposium for the American Anthropological Association meetings entitled,
"Portrayal of Self, Profession, and Culture: Reflexive Perspectives
in Anthropology."(2) This book grew out that symposium.

(2) The original symposium consisted of the following participants and
papers: Stephen Lansing (University of Southern California), "An island
in the liminal zone"; Paul Rabinow (University of California, Berkeley),
"Observer and observed: New form of anthropological presentation";
Dennis Tedlock (University of Massachusetts), "Between text and interpretation:
Toward a dialogical anthropology"; John Szwed (University of Pennsylvania),
"Ethnography-a meditation"; Denise O'Brien (Temple University
"Images of women in the South Seas"; Carol Ann Parssinen (Institute
for the Study of Human Issues), "Social explorers and social scientists:
The dark continent of Victorian ethnography", Barbara Babcock (University
of Arizona), "The dangers of 'delight making' and the difficulties
of describing it"; Victor Turner (University of Virginia "Performative
and reflexive anthropology"; Jay Ruby (Temple University), "Ethnography
as trompe l'oeil: Film and anthropology"; Ira Abrams (University of
Southern California), "A reflexive view of anthropology through its
film"; Richard Chalfen (Temple University), "Ethnofilm and docudrama:
Constructing and interpreting ambiguous realities", Eric Michaels (University
of Texas), "Looking at us looking at the Yanomamo looking at us";
Dan Rose (University of Pennsylvania), discussant.

page 34

A Crack in the Mirror is a collection of essays that explores the relationship
between reflexivity and anthropological theory and practice. Some essays
will concentrate on the question of how the form of an anthropological presentation
(publication) might shape, influence, or create content. Anthropology contains
a dominant ideology (and several contra-ideologies) with appropriate or
accepted forms through which Its concepts are communicated. Those forms,
once acknowledged, can be examined for the ways in which they regulate the
messages. Taking a cue from cross-cultural studies, we suggest that a crossmodal
comparison might be productive. By trying to communicate anthropology using
nontraditional forms, such as film, one becomes aware of the ideology of
anthropology. These ideas are explored in essays that deal with life history
as performance (Myerhoff); anthropological cinema (Ruby and Michaels); the
relationship between the novel and ethnography (Parssinen, Babcock, and
Rabinow); the ethnography as a literary form (Marcus); ethnography as theater
(Turner and Schechner); the written transmission of oral tradition (Tedlock),
and ethnography as autobiography (Rose). We seek to join together in this
book the concepts of performative and communicative reflexivity; to explore
cultural and methodological self-awareness.

Looked at another way, this book is about ethnography from the "inside"
as the primary means of anthropological expression; from the "outside"
in comparison to other written forms such as the novel and as an entity
performed as theater, seen as a film, or heard as a poem. The book challenges
the alphacentric bias of ethnography. It disputes the Idea that ethnography
as a written form is adequate by itself to deal with the varieties of human
experience. Our goal is to renew ethnography by going outside its traditional
boundaries to discover essences and limitations.

page35

References Cited

Alland, Alex
1975 When the spider danced: Notes from an African village. New
York: Doubleday.

Malinowski, Bronislaw
1922 Argonauts of the western Pacific. New York: E. P. Dutton (paperback
edition 1961).
1932 The sexual life of the savages. London: George Routledge.
1967 A diary in the strict sense of the term. Trans. Norbert Guterman.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Maybury-Lewis, David
1965 The savage and the innocent. Boston: Beacon Press

Scholte, Bob
1972 On defining anthropological traditions: An exercise in the ethnology
of ethnology. In 7'he nature and function of anthropological traditions,
ed. Stanley Diamond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.